Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com

gitlab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 285 posts

Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com

#41

Post by mixmastamyk »

zapita wrote: post #19
bachmeier wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"At this point I don't understand why anyone in their right mind would go to the trouble of making their product open-source. It's just not worth it." Umm...that's their business model. It's not an act of generosity. It was a decision that they thought was in their best interest. Do you also think Facebook and Google are making their products free out of the goodness of their hearts?

I don't believe I said anything about their motives.

Also, beside the point. I agree it is not nasty on the surface. But it sure is a callous sentiment—you will submit to our privacy invasion or take a hike. FU indeed.

Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com

#42

Post by afiori »

falcor84 wrote: post #35

Could someone here please explain to me why Gitlab's product managers would be so interested in client-side analytics in the first place? From my familiarity with their service, almost every operation requires an ajax call, or a full page refresh. Is there really that much value for the product managers in these additional analytics?

I believe in this case it is server-size analytics. The case were this would have been significan would have been with self-hosted instances as there gitlab controls neither the servers not the clients

Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com

#43

Post by zapita »

amyjess wrote: post #25
liability wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would it mean for me to 'not allow' other members of a free society to speak their mind? Your right to criticize it and their right to say it are one and the same. Criticizing it and not permitting it are not the same thing.

Loud condemnation from the wider community. Contact their employers. Ban them from contributing to projects. When GamerGate became a thing, every major publication and several major figures in the gaming community all loudly spoke out against the harassment, and many prominent Gamergaters permanently gained reputations as harassers. Not only do we need this kind of condemnation from leaders within the open-source com…

Thank you. That's exactly right.

Unfortunately the problem has deep roots, and the corporations you mention have a track record of either turning a blind eye to bad behavior when the perpetrator is a popular open-source figure (Google), or actively supporting it because the victims are employed by a competitor (Red Hat).

In general, open-source communities are still stuck in the middle ages from an HR perspective. You can be the victim of terrible behavior, and have no recourse at all, because the project itself has no clear legal requirement to protect you, and none of the corporate sponsors will take responsibility for protecting you in the same way they protect their own employees; even if in practice they are the only ones with the power to do so. The result is a legal limbo where people can get away with terrible behavior. I've seen people get crushed by this, it's kafkaesque.

Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com

#44

Post by robszumski »

falcor84 wrote: post #35

Could someone here please explain to me why Gitlab's product managers would be so interested in client-side analytics in the first place? From my familiarity with their service, almost every operation requires an ajax call, or a full page refresh. Is there really that much value for the product managers in these additional analytics?

Even anonymous cohort analysis can be super useful as a product manager. If you want to encourage usage of a particular feature and the most successful users of that feature fit into a cohort, you can reach out to them for feedback, optimize paths between those features, improve documentation connecting relevant features together, etc.

This doesn't mean its malicious or all about the $$$...it might be that users that set up GitLab CI have 40% fewer security incidents and they want to encourage that behavior as a better customer outcome with the overall product.

edit: and this behavior might take place over a long period of time, not something you can get from access logs or just-in-time stats.

Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com

#45

Post by sjburt »

falcor84 wrote: post #35

Could someone here please explain to me why Gitlab's product managers would be so interested in client-side analytics in the first place? From my familiarity with their service, almost every operation requires an ajax call, or a full page refresh. Is there really that much value for the product managers in these additional analytics?

My guess was that it was just seen as easier to drop in a third party analytics component in as opposed to doing via their own backend.

Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com

#46

Post by baddox »

zapita wrote: post #9
tyteen4a03 wrote: post #2

This comment, from the CFO, is particularly nasty: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/merge_requests/14182#no...

You may or may not agree with that comment, but it is not nasty. What is nasty, on the other hand, is the vitriolic reaction to it. So far I count 16 "middle finger" emojis, including one with the subtitle "incompentent or malicious CFO". In what world does a disagreement over the right level of telemetry justify this kind of behavior? It's mind-boggling to me how entitled and aggressive the open-source culture is al…

Assuming we're all using the word "nasty" to mean spiteful or unpleasant, I think it's quite fair to call that comment by the CFO nasty toward users. The CFO is literally saying that users should not have a choice about how their data is used. Now, that may be a "reasonable" business decision for GitLab to make, but it's still quite fair to call it nasty toward users. Again, it's literally the CFO instructing the GitLab product team to remove a choice from their users about how their users' data is being used. Middle fingers and feelings of entitlement may also be nasty, but this comment from the CFO is, in my view, pretty much textbook nasty.

Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com

#47

Post by brlewis »

stiray wrote: post #38
jbk wrote: post #27

We received an apology email at the same time, well written, explaining what they did wrong, apologizing, promising to do a post-mortem, promising to not send to 3rd party trackers, and saying they did a mistake and waiting for feedbacks on the issue tracker. And with very little BS in the mail. Such level of transparency, of apologizing and clarity, especially written at the first person "I am truly sorry." is very…

What should really be praised... Without further, congratulations to everyone protesting against this gitlab move. This is something that should be done years back when google started with its tracking, same with facebook. This was the behaviour that should be seen each and every time some company wants to take advantage of its users. But to my sadness it is rarely seen. So once again congratulations to each and ever…

Yeah, people back then should have written angry replies to Google's and Facebook's advance warnings about the tracking they were planning on doing. /s

Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com

#48

Post by lbotos »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #36

I don't understand, what changed? This was last updated on the 24th. They said they'll be re-evaluating it and returning later, but afaict they haven't made any statements about a blanket cancellation of the telemetry roll-out.

An email is being sent right now, but emailing at scale... takes time:

---8Dear GitLab users and customers,

On October 23, we sent an email entitled “Important Updates to our Terms of Service and Telemetry Services” announcing upcoming changes. Based on considerable feedback from our customers, users, and the broader community, we reversed course the next day and removed those changes before they went into effect. Further, GitLab will commit to not implementing telemetry in our products that sends usage data to a third-party product analytics service. This clearly struck a nerve with our community and I apologize for this mistake.

So, what happened? In an effort to improve our user experience, we decided to implement user behavior tracking with both first and third-party technology. Clearly, our evaluation and communication processes for rolling out a change like this were lacking and we need to improve those processes. But that’s not the main thing we did wrong.

Our main mistake was that we did not live up to our own core value of collaboration by including our users, contributors, and customers in the strategy discussion and, for that, I am truly sorry. It shouldn’t have surprised us that you have strong feelings about opt-in/opt-out decisions, first versus third-party tracking, data protection, security, deployment flexibility and many other topics, and we should have listened first.

So, where do we go from here? The first step is a retrospective that is happening on October 29 to document what went wrong. We are reaching out to customers who expressed concerns and collecting feedback from users and the wider community. We will put together a new proposal for improving the user experience and share it for feedback. We made a mistake by not collaborating, so now we will take as much time as needed to make sure we get this right. You can be part of the collaboration by posting comments in this issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/5672 If you are a customer, you may also reach out to your GitLab representative if you have additional feedback.

I am glad you hold GitLab to a higher standard. If we are going to be transparent and collaborative, we need to do it consistently and learn from our mistakes.

Sincerely, Sid Sijbrandij Co-Founder and CEO GitLab

Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com

#49

Post by mixmastamyk »

zapita wrote: post #11
liability wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "It's mind-boggling to me how entitled and aggressive the open-source culture is allowed to be." 'Allowed' to be? The "open source culture" is the sum of the participants and participation is open to the general public. If being rude were "not allowed" who would be doing the not allowing and why should they be so empowered over members of the general public?

And we collectively allow this behavior. Do we not? For example, I don't see anyone stepping up in that github thread and saying that insults and middle finger emojis are not OK. That's because that behavior is normalized. Participants in the thread either a) are OK with it; b) have resigned themselves to it; c) are refraining from speaking up for fear of being attacked too. That is what I mean by "allowed to happen"…

Authoritarian sentiment at it’s best. Ignore the attacker and focus the discussion on the rudeness of the victim’s response.

Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com

#50

Post by baddox »

zapita wrote: post #11
liability wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "It's mind-boggling to me how entitled and aggressive the open-source culture is allowed to be." 'Allowed' to be? The "open source culture" is the sum of the participants and participation is open to the general public. If being rude were "not allowed" who would be doing the not allowing and why should they be so empowered over members of the general public?

And we collectively allow this behavior. Do we not? For example, I don't see anyone stepping up in that github thread and saying that insults and middle finger emojis are not OK. That's because that behavior is normalized. Participants in the thread either a) are OK with it; b) have resigned themselves to it; c) are refraining from speaking up for fear of being attacked too. That is what I mean by "allowed to happen"…

No, we do not, because we do not make decisions collectively. Or at least, I wasn't consulted. Maybe everyone else was.
Post reply on HN